Pages

Thursday, February 12, 2015

White Bolognese Sauce

Sausage and ground beef, dried mushrooms and Portabellas, white wine, onion and carrots and fennel, with a hint of spice from some chili flakes, and finally, cream. None of these ingredients are remarkable but together as "white Bolognese sauce", and I’m not kidding, they are magic. Stand guard over the pot or it will be gone before dinner is served, one “just tasting” spoonful at a time.

I love Tamar Adler’s wonderful book, An Everlasting Meal, Cooking with Economy and Grace, as much for the conversational, evocative writing as for the delicious recipes. Tamar (Dare I call her Tamar? I feel like we are such old friends after spending so much time together.) weaves stories and musings about ingredients and cooking and love and family into a narrative you can get lost in, bookmarking pages of methods to try, and recipes, until when you finally reach the end, you want to start back at the beginning and read the whole thing again, so rich is the prose.

I’d say An Everlasting Meal it is a way of life, not just a recipe book, if I didn’t think that would scare some of you off. But I will say this, it is a writer’s cookbook. And, from me, there is no higher praise.

No-Tomato Bolognese?
I wish this dish had a better name because White Bolognese doesn’t even begin to describe the rich, hearty, mushroomy, succulent deliciousness that is this meaty sauce. I had already packed up some leftover cottage pie for my husband’s lunch the day after I served this. Cottage pie is one of his favorite things so I had saved it for him especially. He said he’d rather take this!

Cooking for people I love, creating deliciousness out of fresh ingredients, browsing through cookbooks for inspiration, perusing grocery shelves for choice items and writing about my expat life enriched by food. That's what I do here.